Blend Old And New School Tactics For A Successful Marketing Strategy

When you target high-value prospects, your primary goal is not to befriend them but to persuade them to buy your service or product. Any marketer who confuses the two activities will not be marketing for long. It is important to earn their trust gradually in each instance, but you ultimately want them to buy. The tools you use to approach them initially will determine your success.

The digital age has changed the way we connect with high-value prospects. With a "new school" approach, you can quickly and frequently reach out to prospects online and hope they at least read the message.

However, for the "old school" approach, telephone and face-to-face interaction plays an important role in prospecting. (Many of us still appreciate the beloved old-fashioned rotary telephone, whose relative clumsiness and manual operation now amazes -- and amuses -- children.)

Chances are you need to draw on a blend of digital and traditional tools to appeal to the changing needs of your target audience. Here are a few tips on when and how to use each.

Digital Tools

Prospecting using digital media takes time to master, execute and monitor. Before you commit to a digital campaign, ensure your message is clear and that it will resonate with your target audience.

Remember that your first priority is to retain and grow your relationships with your existing clients. Consider hiring a digital media expert to develop your website, your personal or company LinkedIn page, and other platforms. Unless you have the time to learn and leverage social media properly, your results will be uneven at best. It's no longer enough to create a "good" social media platform and content -- you need to create a perfect one that consistently gets your focused message out.

Social media platforms give you the opportunity to build a relationship with a prospect 24/7. In most cases they are inviting conversation to help them fix their problem and you could become their problem solver. As your relationship with them grows, they will be more receptive to hearing from you and receiving relevant information.

As online users skim more and read less, more and more digital alternatives are being added to the marketing arsenal such as podcasts, video blogs and livestreaming. These alternatives are meant to create content that lets prospects hear you on their terms and schedule. And they will continue to tune in if you keep the content educational and focused on solving their needs.

Telephone and face-to-face prospecting can give you level of contact you may not be able to achieve online. It immediately gives you a sense of the mood and degree of receptivity of the prospect and lets you frame your comments and tone accordingly.

As with digital outreach, telephone and other traditional tools rely on sticking with a plan and being deliberate and targeted.

Here are three telephone marketing tips to consider:

Finish what you start and be prepared to continue for the long haul. Like prospecting, telephone marketing is not an event but a process. Accept that one or two phone calls to each prospect won't get you results. You need to be graciously persistent.

Voicemail messages need to generate excitement. Change the content of your voicemails for each prospect. Leave messages that are short, direct and filled with energy. Be sure you are standing and in a quiet place when you call. Your voice will sound strong as oxygen moves more freely through your body. How many great speakers have you seen presenting sitting down?

Do your homework and target your calls. Rather than start at the top of a list of prospects you have quickly and randomly pulled together, research each one and place them in order of importance. Contact your most important prospects first while your energy levels are high. The calls should not be on an ad hoc basis. In the Internet world we live in, there is no reason why you can't distill your list to include only high-potential prospects.

Finding a Balance

The reality is you will need a good mix of both digital and traditional tactics when reaching out to prospects. Researching your audience to determine how they like to receive their information is key before proceeding.

Who are your ideal prospects? (A high-value or ideal prospect may not be an affluent person.)

Is your product or service easy to understand or is it complicated, requiring time and effort to sell to a narrow target audience?

Where are your prospects in the corporate pecking order? Who are their bosses?

Does your target audience gravitate to digital media or do they rely on traditional media for their information and entertainment?

Does your target audience use technology to get their jobs done?

What keeps your target audience awake at night?

Are they light or heavy consumers of the types of services you offer?

What prospecting tools are you most comfortable using and which have brought you most success?

Think "quality" with every approach and tool. Ensure each tactic addresses the needs of the audience.

Your language and messaging must be clear and concise in all forms of sales outreach. Consider hiring a professional to develop your content and materials or at least get one to review your materials and sales pitches before you put them to the test.

Follow HuffPost Canada Blogs on Facebook

MORE ON HUFFPOST:

Close



9 Most Disturbing Marketing Moves Of All Time

of





Thomas Edison couldn’t have pulled this marketing stunt off today without animal activists demanding Edison’s own execution. Even in 1903, his electrocution of Topsy the elephant can still be regarded as the most morbid marketing stunt of all time. Edison used the stunt as part of a smear campaign against his rival Nikola Tesla. Just to be sure the stunt went off without a hitch, Topsy was fed cyanide-laced carrots seconds just before Edison flipped the switch. Jail time served? 0 days. Insane!
Source: OPEN Forum

The extent some people will go to in order to market themselves (and try to get a reality show) never ends. “Balloon boy,” as the media called him, supposedly climbed into a meteorological balloon that broke loose and floated around the globe with the boy inside. The balloon chase that ensued captured national attention. The investigation afterward did too. The boy’s father, Richard Heene, was the mastermind (I use that term loosely) behind the stunt. He got 90 days in jail and learned his lesson—“Do something stupid and the media will come and report on it.” He’s now out of jail and promoting his children as the youngest metal band in the world. I’d say he wants that to be a reality show in the worst way.
Source: OPEN Forum

A Canadian man wearing a purple tutu and advertising the GoldenPalace.com on his bare chest did a belly flop into the Olympic pool at the 2004 Athens games. His antics disturbed some divers so much they failed to complete their dives. He was sentenced to several months in Greek prison.
Source: OPEN Forum

Heart Attack Grill’s over-the-top marketing promotes “taste-worth-dying-for” burgers. When a customer at the Heart Attack Grill had a real heart attack in 2012 as he was eating the “Triple Bypass Burger,” other customers assumed his heart attack, the ambulance and paramedics were part of the grill’s elaborate show. The victim was actually hauled to the hospital with a heart attack, but customers still claim that it was all part of an act. This customer wasn’t the first to have a heart attack at the grill. One of the Grill’s unofficial spokesmen died in front of the grill on Feb. 13, 2013 while waiting on a bus—of a heart attack.
Source: OPEN Forum

Bigger is usually better, unless you’re a 25-foot, 17.5-ton Popsicle on an 80-degree June day. When Snapple tried to erect the world’s largest popsicle in New York’s Times Square in 2005, it discovered that frozen popsicles made of Snapple juice and soaring summer temps don’t play well together. The Snapplesicle melted quickly, flooding parts of Manhattan with kiwi-strawberry-flavored juice. Firefighters had to be called in to close off streets and hose down the mess.
Source: OPEN Forum

Sounds like a made for TV movie: In an attempt to market a new DDoS (distributed denial of service) product, a Web host owner sends a denial of service attack to the Hong Kong stock exchange, then says he has software that can fix it. Not many people were impressed. Seven companies with a combined income of $1.5 trillion HK dollars were forced to suspend trading because of the attacks. Tse Man-lai, 28, went to jail.
Source: OPEN Forum

It was a 2007 “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest. The name was bad enough, but the outcome was so much worse. In an attempt to market itself, Sacramento radio station KDND-FM required contestants to chug as much water as possible without using the bathroom. The winner would take home a Wii. Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old contestant, complained on-air of symptoms consistent with water poisoning (a real and potentially fatal condition), but the DJs on the “Morning Rave” just laughed. Strange died a few hours later. The DJs’ laughter didn’t go over well in court. A jury ordered KDND-FM to pay the Strange family $16.5 million for her death.
Source: OPEN Forum

Emergency personnel and anti-terrorism squads shut down more than a dozen highways, transit stations and other Boston locations on Jan 31, 2007, after hearing about “suspicious devices” around the city. Turns out that Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens had placed placards illuminated by LED lights throughout the area to promote a new show from Cartoon Network. The public thought they looked like IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices). The two men were arrested on the day of the incident and charged with placing a hoax device to incite panic, a felony charge that carries a 5-year maximum sentence, and one count of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor.
Source: OPEN Forum
Photo: Supporters of the artists Sean Stevens and Peter Berdovsky hold signs February 1, 2007 outside Charlestown District Court in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Dell manager Daniel Rawso manager knew Bryan Chester was a Dell employee, but 400 other Dell employees did not. When Chester showed up dressed in black biker wear, wearing a mask and waving metal objects that looked like guns and knives, employees called the police. A SWAT team and two arrests later, both Rawso and Chester were facing misdemeanor charges. The two Dell employees’ attempt to get the company energized around a new marketing push resulted in a trip to jail.
Source: OPEN Forum